The words pressed against my thoughts again, and I closed my eyes. Mabel was pulling me along toward the woods.
“Bridgie, what game are we going to play?”
“Aubrey, what do you think?” Bridget asked. “We could play runaways.”
Runaways didn’t sound like a game to me. It sounded like a stomachache. But I said, “Fine.”
“Let’s be in one family. All sisters,” Mabel said. “I’m Sheila-beila.”
“I’ll be Crystal,” said Bridget. “Aubrey?”
My. My my my …
“I’ll be … I’ll be …”
“Megan-began,” Mabel said.
“Megan. That’s fine,” I said.
Mabel dropped my hand. “Run! Run, sisters! Run!”
She sprinted through the trees. Bridget took off behind her. I hurried to catch up, feeling out of breath already.
My. Sister. My sister. My sister …
“Hurry! He’ll find us!” Mabel screamed. We had played this game before. Mabel had never explained who “he” was, this chaser. It was just part of the game. You can’t run away without something to run away from.
“Bridget,” I panted. “Wait.” The words came out softly, like when I was small and had a fever and called Dad to bring me water. I would call and call, but he wouldn’t come, because really I was not calling that loud, or maybe not even out loud at all.
I heard the other words, pressing, pressing.
My. Sister. Is. My sister is …
I stopped running.
Breathe, Aubrey. Breathe.
It was harder to see. There were patches in my vision, yellow and black. I squinted. It was getting worse.
My. Sister. Is. Dead.
My sister is dead. My Savannah. My only one.
The words, they were all there, and they were all true.
My sister was dead.
My dad was dead.
My mom left me.
My whole family was gone.
I couldn’t breathe. I grabbed a tree for balance and opened my mouth to be sick, but my body wouldn’t throw up. No, other things poured out of my mouth. Wails. Streams of spit, landing on my shoes.
“Aubrey?” a voice said from very far away.
Hurt. Hurt. Hurt. Help. This was not real, this was not real.
“Aubrey?” Then the voice said, “Mabel, go get Gram. Hurry. Run!”
The wailing turned to screaming.
Why couldn’t I find them?
My body bent, stooping to reach the ground. I clawed the dirt, feeling it.
“Come back,” I howled. “Come back!”
“Aubrey. Aubrey,” the voice said.
We’d put them in the ground, Dad and Savannah. I just had to get past the surface, this old dirt, and put my family back together again. I could find them.
“Help me!”
“I’m trying,” the voice said. Hands reached to mine in the dirt. But they didn’t dig. The hands took my hands and lifted them from the ground, empty. I started screaming again.
The hands, and their arms, reached around my middle and pressed, holding me together.
The pillow was soft, underneath, but the pillowcase was stiff and salty, and smudged with dirt. Why would a pillowcase be so dirty?
I wasn’t the only one in the bed. I rolled over, saw Gram’s sleeping face.
When she felt me move, her eyes opened. We looked at each other, really looking at each other’s faces.
Then Gram said, “Do you remember your grandpa?”
I thought.
A tall man. A deep laugh. Me, small, lifted high in the air. A raspberry blown on my stomach …
Raspberries, real ones, the fruit, in a bucket on the porch swing. I’m in a lap, eating the berries, rubbing my sticky hands clean on a white shirt. My grandpa’s shirt.
He didn’t have a face in the memories, but it was him. He loved me. I loved him.
“I do,” I said.
Gram thought again, and spoke slowly. “When your grandfather died, it hurt so much. I remember feeling like I was broken. I thought that if I was broken, there was no point to getting up in the morning. It was so hard to get out of bed, to make breakfast, to take care of the house. And I thought, if I did those things, why would they matter?
“But then I realized I had other things.”
“Like what?”
“I had many other people who mattered to me, and to whom I mattered. None of them could ever be your grandfather, of course, but in the end I got out of bed again. For you.”
“Me?”
“You. Not just you, duckling, but also my other ducklings, my other children and grandchildren. I thought of how you didn’t have to lose both him and me at once. So I got out of my bed. I cleaned my house. I bought a Christmas tree and presents, I started baking. And come Christmastime, you were all here again. My house was not empty anymore. And my life was not empty. My life was not over.”
Gram’s eyes studied me, waited for me. I blinked back at her. Our faces were so close, lying in bed like this.
“I miss them,” I whispered.
“I know,” she said. “So do I, Aubrey.”
I forgot that, that she missed them, too. That they were hers, too.
“After the accident,” Gram continued, “I was hurting again. This time, I thought, my heart is broken, but I have to be strong for Aubrey and my Lissie. It was you, again, that pulled me from my bed in the morning, even after I left you and your mother at your own house to put your lives back together. I shouldn’t have done that so soon, I see that now. Now I miss Savannah, and I worry about Lissie so much I think I can’t move because of the hurt, but I remember that my Aubrey is right here, in my house, and we need each other.”
She kissed my forehead, and climbed out of the bed.
“Sleep well tonight,” she said. “And tomorrow, get out of that bed.”
Gram left. I turned to my other side, toward the night table, and watched Sammy swim slow circles in his bowl.
There was no list for me in the morning. I woke up and lay there for a while, listening to birds and trees outside my window. A light breeze slipped through the screen. The air was fresh.
The sheets felt smooth and cool as I pushed them away. I got out of bed, and the thick summer skin of my feet brushed the dry cracks in the floorboards. I kissed at Sammy and gave him his food pellet. The pellet made a small plop as it hit the water, and the water rustled as Sammy rushed to it.
“Morning, Gram,” I said when I got to the kitchen.
“Morning,” she said, a smile in her voice. “Do you want some scrambled eggs and bacon?”
“I’ll do it,” I said. And I did. I put bread in the toaster. I mixed the eggs and poured them into a buttered pan on the stove. I set bacon in a smaller pan. I made a mess.
Gram set a bowl of raspberries on the table for me. Had she known I was thinking about them yesterday? Did they make her think of Grandpa, too?
I slopped my food onto a plate, oversalted the eggs, and buttered the toast. It was the best breakfast I’d had in a long time.
I made more toast, a whole pile, and stacked my dishes in the sink. I headed to the door. Gram looked up from the laundry she was folding.
“There’s something I have to do,” I said.
Bridget was outside, making a house for little dolls out of sticks.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said. She didn’t look up, but continued her construction.
“I want to tell you what happened,” I said, careful not to drop any toast when my hands shook.
“Yesterday?” she asked.
“No. What happened. To my family.”
Bridget looked up then. “Okay.” She stood up and brushed the dirt off her hands.
I handed her toast as we walked toward the woods. When we came to Bridget’s scar tree, we sat down.
Toast was maybe a bad choice. It was hard to choke down without a drink. I began shredding the top piece.
&nb
sp; We were quiet for several minutes.
Bridget spoke first.
“I still come out here and climb this tree, you know. I’ve been higher even than when I fell.”
I took a deep breath, and another. I didn’t tell her that I had climbed her tree, too.
“We had a wreck,” I said.
“A wreck?”
“An accident. A car accident.”
I paused. It had been hard enough to say just that out loud, without even telling the story. But I had to tell, now.
“We never really went on vacations,” I started. “I mean, except here, to see Gram. We never went and stayed in a hotel or anything. But Dad took a couple of days off in April, and he and Mom thought it would be fun just to go somewhere, so we drove about three hours to a hotel. It was fun. We stayed three days, and ate all the breakfast we wanted and played in the pool and went out to restaurants and watched cable in the room. Then on Sunday we started back. It was raining only a little when we left, so we got on the interstate. There were a lot of trucks and it was hilly, and soon the rain was just pouring down. You couldn’t really see anything. I was sitting behind Mom. She was driving. The rain sounded good on the car and road and it made me sleepy. I was tired from the trip, so I put my head against the window and fell asleep. Savannah, I remember, had a coloring book out and headphones on, last I looked.
“So I was sleeping when it happened. They told me later, at the hospital, that a truck went out of control. It hit us, and crunched our car against the metal divider in the middle of the road. We flipped over. I woke up for only a second, because my head hit the window.”
Bridget interrupted me. “Is that where your …”
I reached up and touched my scar.
“No, that happened on the other side from something broken inside the car.”
Bridget went back to just listening. She was sitting with her knee pulled up in front of her, her head resting on it. She looked straight at me as I talked.
“When I was awake, just for that moment, I heard screaming. I hurt all over, but I couldn’t see anything. I could just feel that everything was wet. From the rain, and from my cut. There was blood in my eyes. And I could smell that I had thrown up. That’s all I remember of it.”
I’d spent months not thinking of that one moment, that one terrible, hour-long minute. Now I wasn’t crying, and my stomach felt steady. Bridget made me brave.
“The next time I woke up, I was in the hospital. I was so scared, wondering why I was alone. I hurt everywhere, and I had bruises over almost my whole body. They told me I could visit Mom soon, but I wondered why they didn’t say anything about anyone else, about Dad, and Savannah.”
“How old was she?” Bridget asked gently.
“Seven,” I said, getting close to crying. I swallowed and pushed it away. I tossed the torn pieces of toast onto the ground. Birds would eat them, and squirrels, after Bridget and I left.
“I’m sorry,” Bridget said. Her eyes were red, almost crying, but she didn’t look away from me.
“Everyone came—Gram, and my other grandparents, and all the uncles and aunts from both sides, and friends. There were so many people. That whole week after the hospital, with the funeral—and then after it—I don’t remember much of it at all, just little bits: Seeing the two caskets together, one big and one small. Uncle David trying to get me to eat lasagna someone from church had brought by, and I wouldn’t. Realizing I was wearing nice black clothes I had never seen before that I didn’t remember putting on, and wondering who got them for me. The worst—I wanted to tell Dad something. And I couldn’t. Would never …”
I stopped talking. There was only one more part, really. About Mom.
“Mom and I… see, she had been driving the car when… I think that mattered…. But it wasn’t her fault… not really….” I couldn’t finish this part. “She’s not a bad person…. She had something … terrible happen.”
“I believe you,” said Bridget.
There were two pieces of toast left. I handed her one and started to eat the other, slowly, listening to it crunch between my teeth.
“Aubrey? I believe you,” Bridget said again. “It’s okay.”
She stood and held out a hand. I let her pull me up. She hugged me, and with her arm around my waist, she walked me back to my grandmother’s house.
Dear Jilly,
I remembered something today.
I remembered that one pink rose that was left in my room after the funeral. Because I didn’t know who put it there and I didn’t see anyone go in or out of my room, I wanted to pretend it was from you, even though I know that doesn’t really make much sense. I think that’s how much I missed Savannah. I wanted to think that part of her was still around.
Now that I remember it, I wish I had brought that flower with me here to Vermont. It is still in my old room, dried somewhere.
But I guess it will be there when I get back, and I can find it then.
Love,
Aubrey
I told Gram I didn’t need anything, but she said that wasn’t true. She said I needed boots, hats, mittens, and scarves for the winter, and new sneakers, and sweaters—at least three more—and a sweatshirt that wasn’t so grubby, and a few new pairs of jeans, and certainly one could always use new socks and underwear, and think of all the school supplies! In other words, I didn’t have a choice. I found myself sitting in the car on the way to do back-to-school shopping.
We went to these stores called “the outlets.” I had never heard of them before, but they seemed like regular stores to me, except more crowded. Even though I had tried on everything in the fitting rooms, Gram insisted that I try it all on again when we got home, before I took the tags off.
I pulled on a blue striped shirt and a new pair of jeans and walked to the bathroom to look in the mirror.
“What do you think?” Gram asked. “I think it looks pretty good.”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” I said, turning around to look at myself from the back in the mirror. “When does school start, anyway?”
“Oh, you know, middle of next week,” Gram said.
I walked back to my room to try on a different set of clothes. “What day, exactly?”
“I think Wednesday.”
“No, Gram, what is the date?”
“September seventh.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not doing anything on September seventh.”
I slammed the door, kicked aside my three hundred bags of new things, and climbed into my bed, pulling the covers over me tight.
From the other side of the door, Gram called, “You can’t seal that day off forever. You need to keep living.”
I turned my back to the door. Keep living, I thought. Just like Mom was doing? She had sealed off everything outside her, so I could have one day.
When Gram hadn’t come back in a few hours, I had the feeling I had lost the argument. We would see when the day came. Maybe I just wouldn’t get on the school bus. Maybe I just wouldn’t get out of bed.
I didn’t want to look at my new school things. I shoved them into the closet and pushed the door shut.
I teased Sammy while I fed him. I rolled his food pellet between my thumb and index finger. He could see it. He waggled his tail and directed his bulgy eyes at me.
He jumped then, right out of his bowl, and into my hand. I screamed. I was going to drop him, and he would be squirming and dying on the floor. But he slipped off my skin and back into the bowl with a splunk. The food fell back in with him and he gulped it up.
I stood watching, my heart wishing to beat normally again.
Two days before school started, someone knocked on the screen door. It was Bridget, wearing a backpack.
“Let’s disappear,” Bridget said.
Disappear.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, let’s go off for a day.”
“Where?”
“In the woods.”
She opened her backpack and showe
d me a bundle of peanut-butter sandwiches.
“Will your mom worry?”
“Nah. She made us the sandwiches for a picnic. She thought it might be fun.”
Bridget’s mom knowing about the whole thing made it all right.
“Hang on a minute,” I said. I ran upstairs and grabbed an envelope off my desk. As I ran back downstairs, I yelled, “See you, Gram, I’m with Bridget!” I stepped onto the porch and closed the door behind me. “Let’s go.”
Bridget and I set off into the woods, past the scar tree. Bridget seemed to know where she was going. We followed a wide, well-worn path. It started to climb up a bit. Bridget grasped my hand to tug me along.
“Aubrey? Who’s Jilly?”
“What?” I asked.
“Who’s Jilly? It says Jilly on your envelope.”
“Jilly is… well, it sounds silly.”
“You can tell me.”
“Savannah had an imaginary friend named Jilly.”
“And you write to her? She’s not, you know, real.”
“I know, I just… I don’t know what it is. I just started doing it when I moved here.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. To have something from… before? I think things, and put them in the letter, and then I just… send it away.”
“Oh. Okay.” We kept walking. “Does it help?”
“What?”
“Does it help? Writing the letter?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Are you going to laugh at me? You can laugh.”
Bridget shifted her fingers around mine to hold tighter.
“No,” she said without a hint of a giggle. “I’m not going to laugh.”
With my other hand I held on to Jilly’s letter.
After a little while I asked, “Why did you want to run away today?”
“Huh?”
“Did something bad happen?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“No. We’re not really running away, it’s pretend. Mom knows where we are.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s just, no one runs away without a reason. There has to be some kind of reason.”
Baby Savannah has finally fallen asleep for her nap.
“Can we play now?” I whisper to Mom.
“Sure. You hide, I’ll count.”